Why don’t staff at the Covenant Health facilities get their flu shots?

The question boggles me, year after year.

In truth, few hospitals and health facilities in Alberta are doing a stellar job of ensuring their workers get immunized against influenza.

Last week, Alberta Health Services released its latest report card on vaccination rates in health centres. The rates are up from this time last year, by 2.8 per cent. Yet only two facilities in this entire province had vaccination rates of better than 80 per cent.

“It’s increasing slowly, but it’s not as quick as we would like,” said Dr. Gerry Predy, the senior medical officer of health for Alberta Health Services.

Predy says vaccination rates can vary greatly between hospitals, and even between units.

“Some of it is individual hospital culture. Some of it is having a champion on-site.”

One person who takes a leadership role in encouraging vaccination, he said, can make the difference.

So gold stars to the Grande Prairie Cancer Centre and the Oildfields General Hospital in Black Diamond, where almost 90 per cent of staff have already had their flu shots.

And a pat on the back to the folks who work at the Stollery Children’s Hospital. As of Dec. 4, 75 per cent of them had been jabbed.

After that, vaccination rates fall at Edmonton-area hospitals — particularly at hospitals run by Covenant Health, the Catholic health-care provider.

At the Misericordia Community Hospital, only 53 per cent of staff had been vaccinated, as of Dec. 4.

At the Grey Nuns, the rate was even lower — just 50 per cent of staff had received flu shots.

But it’s the number for the Edmonton General Continuing Care Centre — primarily a long-term care facility which serves patients and residents with complex health needs — that’s truly outrageous.

At the General, only 46 per cent of workers were immunized. (Though things are even worse at St. Joseph’s General Hospital in Vegreville, which has a dismal staff vaccination rate of just 38 per cent, one of the lowest for any hospital in the province.)

The Grey Nuns and the Misericordia have busy maternity wards. Most of the General’s patients are elderly. Both babies and seniors are particularly vulnerable to dangerous complications from influenza.

Sixty-four per cent of staff at Villa Caritas, Covenant’s centre for geriatric psychiatry patients, had their shots this year. But it’s the only Covenant facility where more than 60 per cent of staff have been vaccinated.

It is baffling to me that people who work every day, serving and helping people who are sick and vulnerable, can’t be bothered to get a free shot that could protect the patients in their care. It doesn’t matter if they’re surgeons, or nurses, or porters or cleaners. If they work in hospitals, they should be making every effort to protect patients from potentially deadly infection.

No flu vaccine guarantees perfect immunity. The main strain this year seems to be H3N2, a tricky bug to beat, said Predy, because it mutates. He estimates this year’s vaccine may only be 40 per cent effective.

But it will still provide some protection, enough to make it worth the bother of getting the needle. Because this has already been a nasty early influenza season in which 13 people have died, and another 632 were sick enough to require hospitalization. Hospitals shouldn’t be places where you’re actually at great risk of getting infected.

“I know the numbers look pretty bad, so we have to do some research to find out why,” said Karen Macmillan, the senior operating officer for acute care services at the Grey Nuns. “We take it very seriously, so we have to see if we can find ways to improve it.”

Her intensive care unit, she says, has an immunization rate of 96 per cent. She wants to see what she can learn about why they are getting vaccinated while their colleagues are not.

But Macmillan insists immunization rates at her hospital are higher than the AHS report states. She believes staff may be getting vaccinated in the community and neglecting to tell the hospital. But because the hospital isn’t allowed to ask staff who has or hasn’t been vaccinated, she has no way to know. Macmillan says she’s only able to ask staff members if they’re vaccinated if there’s an outbreak in the unit where they work. And by that time, of course, it may be too late.

Flu vaccine, however imperfect, reduces risks. It can even save lives. How bad does an outbreak need to be before hospitals adopt a common-sense approach to immunization?

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.